First ever New Lingustic Survey begins

Mysore, May 21 (UNI) The first ever New Linguistic Survey of India (NLSI) took off today with a summer school workshop for manpower to be involved in the survey during next ten years being held at the Central Institute of India Languages (CIIL) here today.

More then 300 students and experts from 44 universities across the country are participating in the workshop which will continue till June 30.

The Planning Commission had sanctioned Rs 588 crore for the mega project which would be expected to begin from August second week. This project was approved under the XI Plan Period.

Inaugurating the workshop, CIIL Director Uday Naryana Singh said the NLSI had to provide a rigorous grammatical description of all India languages as spoken around 2000 AD and a brief sketch of their speech varieties through a set of language-wise and state-wise reports which would include a description of their distribution and mutual interactions.

One had to understand as well as underscore seven points on the NLSI planning for its initiation. They were creation of appropriate manpower training programmes, creation of the database structure and appropriate architecture, finalisation of the extent of survey, a close relook at the coverage and the outcomes and identification of rules of respective organisation and the management structure among others.

Stating that the process of training would be an intensive, continuous and upgradation process, he said it would comprise continuous evaluation of the process itself.

Initially, it was planned to train 1,200 students and eventually as they gained experience, each pair would act as an anchor for ten more researchers, thus involving 6,000 data gatherers and basic analysts.

As time passed by there would be 6,000 more, thus totalling a manpower of 12,000, he added.

UNI